A Wealth Of Information Creates A Poverty Of Attention

I want to share an essay extract from a blog post by  Conversable Economist.

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

Last Easter, my neighbors bought their daughter a pair of rabbits. Whether by intent or accident, one was male, one female, and we now live in a rabbit-rich world. Person less fond than I am of rabbits might even describe it a rabbit-overpopulated world. Whether a world is rich or poor in rabbits is a relative matter. Since food is essential for biological populations, we might judge the world as rabbit-rich or rabbit-poor by relating the number of rabbits to the amount of lettuce and grass (and garden flowers) available for rabbits to eat. A rabbit-rich world is a lettuce-poor world, and vice versa. The obverse of a population problem is a scarcity problem, hence a resource-allocation problem. There is only so much lettuce to go around, and it will have to be allocated somehow among the rabbits.

Similarly, in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information resources that might consume it.

A large share of the costs of an information-rich environment are carried by information users, not information providers.” 

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If you think the writer of this essay is describing a 21st-century information overload problem, think again. This is an extract from an essay written by a Nobel laureate, Herbert A. Simon, way back in 1971. It’s incredible how Herbert Simon foresaw this attention crisis decades ago, long before modern-day attention-grabbing devices like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter were even imagined.

The lesson? We must become active curators of our own focus. By guarding our time and attention fiercely, we can navigate the information deluge and ensure that the wealth of knowledge available to us at the click of a keystroke empowers rather than overwhelms us.